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Welcome back to Forests Over Trees, your weekly tech strategy newsletter. It’s time to zoom-out, connect dots, and (try to) predict the future.

Here’s the plan:

• Tech News Takes — super-short analysis and commentary

• Tool of the Week — tools you’ll find useful

• Strategy Tips — strategy nuggets (for business and life)

YouTube Wins Podcasting

Plus: DeepSeek price war; Crypto rollercoaster continues

⚡ Tech News Takes ⚡

DeepSeek Continues the Price War

• What’s up: Chinese AI startup DeepSeek started offering discounts of up to 75% for off-peak API use of its AI models. And “off peak” is relative to China — meaning the discounts apply from 8:30am -4:30pm Pacific in the US. DeepSeek’s low-cost AI models caused market panic when first released in January, because they threaten premium model companies (and anyone else with a sky-high valuation thanks to AI). On top of the discount window, DeepSeek is also racing to release their next model ASAP, accelerating from a planned May 2025 launch date.

• So what: The DeepSeek beatings will continue until morale improves. For them, this makes perfect sense. Discounting helps DeepSeek boost overnight revenues to subsidize more model development research, and accelerating their next launch helps them stay in the news and boost adoption. But for OpenAI, Anthropic, and other frontier model companies investing big $$ and pursuing a premium pricing model, this hurts. OpenAI and Gemini already cut their prices in response to DeepSeek last month. So it’s clear that the dynamic we dove deep on a few weeks ago — value being gifted to consumers and sliced away from model companies — is only going to accelerate. They desperately need to find moats or customer use cases to focus on…

YouTube Leads in Podcasting

• What’s up: YouTube has over 1 billion monthly podcast viewers. According to Edison Research, that’s ~31% of the podcast market, edging-out Spotify’s 27% and Apple’s 15%. YouTube also reported that 400 million hours of podcast content were watched on living room TVs last year, on top of viewtime on mobile. Finally, to better align ads with podcast formats and avoid interrupting in the middle of someone speaking, YouTube will launch a new version of mid-roll ads that target pauses in the conversation.

• So what: Lots to unpack here. First, it’s interesting to see how the shift in consumer habits is affecting them. Spotify has more history with being podcast-focused, but YouTube has more experience being video-centric, which is the direction podcasts are going. Second, YouTube’s overall split between mobile and living room is 63% / 37%… so although the 400M hour number is scary for Spotify, they’re both more mobile-centric and can keep fighting the good fight. Third, the new ad format is smart, even if it’s only a signaling exercise and the actual ads don’t change much. They’re marketing it as a way to preserve the quality of the podcast (no interruptions) and have more engagement on ads (higher creator revenue)… trying to win the hearts and minds of creators.

The Crypto Rollercoaster Continues

• What’s up: First, the SEC has dropped its investigations into Robinhood, Uniswap Labs (a decentralized exchange), and OpenSea (a marketplace for NFTs) within the last week. All three were accused of running unregistered securities brokers/exchanges. Second, a group of North Korean hackers — the Lazarus Group — hacked Bybit (an advanced trading exchange) for $1.5B. It’s the largest single theft in crypto history.

• So what: The dropped investigations are good news for crypto. As we’ve covered before — the SEC wasn’t acting in good faith to give them rules of the road and reliable methods for registration. Both the acting head of the SEC and Trump’s new pick are more open to crypto, so this could mean clearer rules and more innovation and growth in crypto thanks to that clarity. On the other hand, the hack is a huge step back. There’s been ongoing debates in crypto for years about the security vs convenience tradeoffs of holding crypto on your own vs. leaving it in an exchange. Holding your own crypto can be complicated, hurting adoption and slowing down transaction volume… so it was encouraging to see exchanges becoming more secure…

🛠️ Tool of the Week 🛠️

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🧭 Strategy Tips 🧭

YouTube Wins Podcasting

Today's strategy tip is all about doing your job!

We’ll dive deeper on YouTube’s podcast explosion, using the Jobs to Be Done framework to make it make sense.

Jobs to Be Done

The framework, popularized by legendary professor and consultant Clayton Christensen, is a mindset shift…

Instead of being obsessed with what a product is, it encourages people to think about why people use it. So it’s not about features, it’s about benefits.

Here are the steps to implementing it:

1.  Identify the job the product will get “hired” to do ( ex. build a birdhouse)

2. Map the customer journey to identify friction points (ex. crushed fingers)

3. Design a product to do the job, but better (ex. glue instead of hammer + nails)

Let’s bring this back to podcasts!

Podcast Player Jobs to be Done

Podcast players, like most things in life, have multiple jobs. Here are a few:

• Serve as passive entertainment on walks and car trips

• Keep people entertained, hanging on every word

• Help people discover podcasts they love

• Create a sense of community with the host and the commenters

But over time, the relative importance of these jobs has shifted.

Passive listening is down, and everything else is up.

Video podcasts are more entertaining… People seeking out community in the comments of all the major platforms… And discovery – amid the continued explosion in podcasts – is more and more important.

Spotify vs. YouTube

So for Spotify, which does great with passive listening, isn’t video native, and isn’t great at discovery/community … those trends are not good. They need to invest and prioritize those newer/growing jobs.

YouTube, on the other hand, is great at entertainment, discovery via recommendation algorithms, and fostering community in the comments. They just need to keep leaning in on those trends.

Wrapping Up

For the founders and leaders out there – here’s the core lesson:

Do those jobs, people!

The forest is growing.
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